Factory Outlet Malls

• Orlando Premium Outlets (formerly Prime Outlet Mall – Orlando) – There are actually two Orlando Premium Outlets in the area. One is located at 4951 International Drive in Orlando. There are over 180 factory stores within this large shopping complex. Stores include Facconable, Hugo Boss, Kenneth Cole, Pearl Izumi, New Balance, Under Armour and True Religion. The second Premium Outlet mall is located at 8200 Vineland Avenue. There are over 70 premium store brands here including AIX Armani Exchange, Barneys New York, Fendi, Lululemon Athletica, Roberto Cavalli, Salvatore Ferragamo and Zegna. Some of the shops exist at both locations and do change over time. Check the outlet mall website for a complete store directory. The mall on Vineland Avenue is right off Interstate 4 which is very close to Disneyworld.
• Lake Buena Vista Factory Stores/Shops – There are approximately 48 outlet shops in this outlet mall. Stores in the Lake Buena Vista mall include Aeropastale, Gap, Under Armour, Tommy Hilfiger and Izod. Check the mall website for the updated directory of stores. The Lake Buena Vista Resort Village & Spa is adjacent to this factory outlet center.

Designer Shopping Mall

• The Mall at Millenia – This large designer mall is close to Universal Orlando. If you have a half day or several hours after visiting Harry Potter and/or the Islands of Adventure, stop by and shop a little. Designer brand stores in this enclosed air conditioned mall include Anthropologie, Gucci, ILORI, L’ Occitane, Louis Vuitton, Lucky Brand blue jeans, Montblanc, and Zara. Anchor stores in this mall include Neiman-Marcus and Bloomingdale’s. Dining choices are also great in this mall including PF Chang’s and Brio Tuscan Grille. Vista Cay villas and the Isle at Cay Commons communities are quite close to this shopping mall.
  

  Orlando Malls

The good news for visitors to Orlando is that all these shopping malls are in close proximity to Universal Orlando and Walt Disney World®. In fact, 2 of the 4 malls are very close to many Kissimmee vacation resorts and within minutes of the Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway (US 192). Other malls and factory stores do dot the landscape around Kissimmee and Orlando, but the ones mentioned are some of our favorite shopping options for any visitor to Central Florida.

As we have discussed with many travel friends over the years, we are reminded why vacation homes are such a great family travel idea.

In the spirit of this, our top 5 reasons for taking a family vacation in Orlando are:

• Culture – Orlando is truly a multi-cultural place. Travelling in the parks gives any family the ability to meet people from across the globe. Beyond the great entertainment, enabling your kids the capability to interact with children of all nationalities is a great learning opportunity.
• Friends – My husband and I still have friends from family vacationing over 20 years ago. Even though we are separated by thousands of miles, we have made lifelong friends from family vacations.
• Adventure – Family vacations bestow kids the ability to meet others, and to take on adventure they would not otherwise experience. A good example locally is the Florida Eco Safaris attraction.
• Togetherness – We often talk about all the activities, attractions and events on vacation, but miss the priceless aspect – family togetherness.
• Fun – Family vacations hopefully provide us plenty of this. Smile, life is good on vacation!

What does this have to do with staying in a vacation villa and why in Orlando? Orlando is unique in its variety of family activities and attractions which foster all the attributes mentioned above. Choices for homes for rent are also abundant.

Vacation homes comfortably sustain families on vacation with privacy, ample space and luxury. Compare what vacation homes have to offer with any other type of accommodation. Moreover, if you are looking for great tips on family travelling, click here to consult this helpful travel tips website or Peter Greenberg’s travel news.

Our website for reviews on over 80+ vacation home communities including the best resorts near Walt Disney World. Our profiles contain valuable information along with videos from each of the reviewed resorts. Find out why thousands of travellers to Orlando consider vacation rentals to be the best family travel idea.

Orlando Family Vacation

• Emerald Island Villas
• Reunion Resort
• Terra Verde Resort
• Watersong Resort
• Windsor Hills Resort
• Windsor Palms Resort

The defining qualities of a family vacation resort include, but are not limited to spacious kitchens, gated or guarded grounds, ample resort community pools, a playground on the resort premises, and even possibly a game room in the clubhouse. All of our favorite resort communities mentioned above have all or most of these amenities for a great family trip in Orlando.

Each of our community profiles contains a resort star rating to help you assess the quality threshold for each family resort. Larger families needing a three or four bedroom home will find the economics of renting a vacation home very appealing.

Once again, the unique element of the vacation home rental market in Orlando is the vast amount of choices available. All vacation homes in Orlando are not created equal. We do the research and reviews on most family vacation resort communities to help you make the best possible decision. This research saves you hours of flipping through various web pages looking for reliable information. It’s all right in one place for easy review.

Orlando Family Vacation Ideas

The Orlando Sentinel (1) recently noted that Orlando hotels are now facing the worst economic conditions since recordkeeping began over 20 years ago. These are business conditions possibly worse than the aftermath of 9/11.

We projected that many hotels in Orlando would be facing some type of systemic failure back in December of 2008 (2).

Checking rates for September 28^th 2009 for one night, we identified several major luxury hotel brands offering rates under $99 directly on their websites. The irony is that thousands more branded new luxury hotel rooms have either recently opened or are just opening, further increasing supply in an oversaturated market.

Some related articles are claiming that as many as one in five hotels are now in some stage of foreclosure (3). Hotels are now also facing their most aggressive competition from timeshare rentals and vacation homes.

Orlando vacation homes can now be rented for the price of a typical hotel room, but offer multiple bedrooms, living spaces, full service kitchens and even private garages, pools and game rooms. Based on personal experience, once a consumer has rented a vacation home and understands the concept, they will not rent a hotel room again.

What does this mean for our readers? We think that booking a vacation home with a reputed and accredited vacation home management company is always the best value and solution for travelers.

There really is credence to the fact that vacation home communities are in fact brands. This is simply a new paradigm for the general public, and for the travel and tourism blogosphere.

I’ll give you a personal example that occurred late last week which exemplifies the power of brands.

I traveled to several communities, made some notes for our blog, and then did tours of several rental houses. Although my observations are not empirical, I was shocked to see the high occupancy in Windsor Hills Review and Emerald Island Review versus many of the other vacation home communities.

This trend was especially noticeable as you moved down the quality spectrum. The lower rated communities, referencing our quality reviews, appeared to be relatively slow.

There are powerful Orlando area vacation home community brands at work that drive rate and occupancy and are derived from reputation branding and referrals. This also confirms an earlier post on Orlando villa comparison rates for rental homes regarding the impact of quality on rental rates.

For some reason, the vacation rental business became commoditized. In other words, vacation rentals have been marketed as short term rentals on the Internet with no differentiators for quality other than mostly size of home and time of year. Contrast this with the marketing of real estate which does just the opposite. Location of the homes and perceived quality of the neighborhood (as reflected in a per square foot sales price) often drive home pricing.

Our core belief for this site, and on our home page, is that all vacation home communities are NOT created equal.

Visit our website for independent reviews on over eighty vacation home community brands along with travel and tourism news of interest to Orlando visitors.

There are lots of brands to choose from in the Orlando area!

Orlando Vacation Home Brands

Disney released quarterly earnings today with third quarter profit dropping 26%. The most important item for Orlando businesses was the fact that domestic park attendance actually rose 3% mainly due to heavy discounting. International parks and resort attendance dropped 9%. CEO Bob Iger also indicated that the company did see signs of economic stabilization.

The big question for any local businesses is how long the discounting will continue. The Disney CFO, Tom Staggs, indicated that discounts such as the “Buy 4, Get 3″ promotion will continue as long as the economy remains weak. Without this heavy discounting, the drop in local transient leisure hotel occupancy would be even more dramatic.

Feedback from our sources indicates that proximity to the Disney parks is even more paramount from an occupancy impact. It’s pretty apparent that hotels further from the parks are really struggling. As it relates to vacation homes, distance to the attractions is important as well. Our site makes an attempt at profiling over 80 vacation home communities on several factors including distance to major attractions.

Disney Earnings

We continue a theme from a previous post due to reader comments and e-mails. As a former hotelier, it was not uncommon for some media companies to actively solicit written reviews about our hotel on various travel web and review sites. At the time, it was described as “reputation management”. Packages typically came in number of reviews per month (i.e. 30 reviews a month would cost $150). A small price to pay for those who desired to drive reservations to their hotel via higher consumer rankings on the website. This may come as shocking news for some people.

Individuals expressed concern to the professional review writers that multiple reviews from one IP address (its like a computer phone number) would be detected by the review site, but managed review writing is now so advanced that every post can be written by the same author with a different IP address. 

I always declined such offers due to ethical reasons, and often can spot anomalies when I personally review hotel ratings on some sites.

The UK Times Online recently exposed a similar practice in the hospitality industry (read here) putting into question the reliability of some consumer review sites.

As technology junkies, one of our favorite technology review sites is CNET. This site not only provides consumer reviews, but is balanced by a professional and independent review from CNET itself (see it here). As a technology consumer, we always look at the professional review first (given their purported independent level of knowledge and expertise), and then look at the consumer reviews for possible other nuggets of information.

As a result, we think it is credible for review sites in the vacation home industry to have an independent knowledgeable review / opinion first, and unbiased vacation reviews as a follow-up. This could be applied to reviews of Orlando, Clermont, Kissimmee and Davenport Fl vacation homes. Let us know if you have any comments.

Vacation Home Reviews

After our recent post on monitoring Orlando vacation home community ratings, we were curious to see how stringent some travel review websites are for evaluating Orlando area vacation home communities.

 After evaluating several travel website’s vacation home rating systems, here are our conclusions:

• Some sites need to be more comprehensive. We evaluate over 80 communities on our site based on various factors. Other travel review websites typically have less than half that number evaluated.
•   Some sites could rate vacation home communities much more stringently. Our quality breakdown is roughly 25% Good or Best, 50% Average and 25% Value. Some other review based sites tend to be far more lenient with 35% 4 or 5 star and 65% 3 star on average. None rated communities at the 2 star level or less which seemed unusual.
•  The other striking takeaway is the fact that some smaller vacation home communities are at a big disadvantage on major vacation home review sites. Many of the best vacation home communities near Disney are some of the smallest, at least in terms of the quality of the facilities. In fact, many of our readers often prefer the smaller communities.

Our conclusion after reviewing some of the travel review websites is a need to be far more comprehensive in terms of the number of communities evaluated, more stringent regarding quality designations, and to be more inclusive of the smaller vacation home community resorts.

We always strive to continuously improve the website, our blog and our evaluation opinions. If you do have any elements or areas you wish to see added, please provide us your feedback and ideas.

One might ask, when is the best time to visit Orlando, Florida?

As the  best months go, the answer is generally September. There are several reasons for this:

1. School is back in session – the parks are relatively empty.
2. Weather – It will begin to cool down and be more comfortable, but sunny enough to get a tan.
3. Rental rates for vacation homes are low in September. These rates typically offer a lot more value than  hotels.
4. Heavy incentives – When business is as slow as it is in September, renters pull out all the incentive stops to attract tourist dollars (i.e. two for the price of one, kids eat free, early bird specials, etc…)

Therefore, the best time to visit Orlando is September for several reasons. It is the slowest month of the year for tourism, the weather is typically great, and you can save a bundle.

Best Time to Visit Orlando

This is not surprising, but this domestic number is especially weak considering that mid-year 2008 was a period of escalating air travel pricing. The OIA also noted that April, 2009 was a period for air travel volume over three million passengers, the first of that magnitude in nine months.

The next several months should be superficially good year-over-year travel comparisons. The petroleum and jet fuel commodities bubble pricing began in mid-year 2008 with subsequent traffic falling dramatically afterwards.

On this blog, we have been emphasizing the importance of the international market to the Orlando villa rental market from inception. Spending by international travelers is projected to be close to $10 billion annually with resulting tax receipts over $1 billion.

Continued expansion of international air capacity at OIA will undoubtedly help Orlando villa owners and rentals longer term because this group tends to disproportionately patronize these accommodations.

Travel to Orlando FL

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